Paris

Today was a very busy day for us! We saw everything important to see in Paris and still had some time to sit and enjoy. We started the day by going to Montmarte. Montmarte is the tallest hill in Paris and houses the basilica of the sacred heart (Sacre-Coeur). It is a big church that can be seen from anywhere in the city because it is the at the highest point. It is one of the younger churches we are going to look at, construction didn't start until 1875. The inside was pretty typical with the exception of a giant Sacred Heart Jesus painted on the ceiling. We weren’t aloud to take pictures inside so we don't have any, but it was cool. From there we took the funicular down the hill and the metro to cite island in the middle of the Scenes river.

Cite Island houses some really cool stuff!

First of all, remember that Disney movie, the Hunchback of Norte Dame? Yeah, we went there. The Notre-Dame Cathedral was completed in 1182! The church suffered a lot of damage during the revolution and was abandoned for a time. When the novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame came out there was a lot of renewed interest in the building and it was restored. Some of the stone work is original from the 1182 church, some is taken from other similar churches in the area and dates a few hundred years later and some was recreated in the 19th century during the renovation. The same is true of the glass. The rose windows are the original glass. We went on a free tour and learned a lot about the cathedral and its past and near the end of the tour mass was starting. Although there were hundreds of people in the cathedral only about thirty were watching and participating in mass. Rachel and I did! It was obviously in French, which made it a little confusing, but the parts in Latin we could sing along with thanks to our time in choir. Speaking of choir, random interesting fact, all of the angels carved on the center portal were modeled of the choir boys singing in the church in 1180. When it was time to take communion I got in line, but Rachel didn't want to so she stayed at our seat. When I got to the head priest, I put my hands over my chest like I learned as a kid and the priest drew a cross on my forehead with his thumb and winked at me. After communion he invited us all to a movie that evening about the cathedral in three languages. His English was perfect, not even an accent. He sounded like an American.

After mass we stopped for lunch at a café across the street. I had a crepe and Rachel got a cheese plate. Both were delicious. We headed towards the Sainte-Chapelle. That is a chapel built in 1248 to house the crown of thorns (which is now housed in the Notre-Dame). It is two levels and is made mostly of stained glass. I really wanted to see it, but the line was incredibly long and after waiting in it for about twenty minutes and making little progress, we decided that we would spend our 10 Euros elsewhere. We walked to a metro station and headed towards the Eifel Tower. We thought we would try our luck again after our attempt yesterday was rained out. We also wanted to look into a dinner cruise on the Seine. We decided against the 90something Euro dinner cruise and instead for a package that includes dinner in a nearby restaurant and a 60 minutes sightseeing cruise. *tourist trapped* I'll talk about that later. We went the one block to the tower because we wanted to go to the top. We got in line after it had curved around the plaza twice. This time it only took us about five minutes to realize waiting in that line would be a huge waist of time, so we decided to check out this museum I really wanted to see. It is a small museum that features Claud Monet, an impressionist painter. We walked there and it was delightful! The whole bottom level was Monet and was fantastic. The ground floor had a lot of 19th century furniture and other paintings. The upper level was a exhibition of a photographer. He specialized in Bulls, nature, and nudes. All of his photos were beautiful and Rachel really wanted to buy a book of his art, but they didn't have any that we really liked so we skipped that souvenir. We strolled back towards the tower just in time for the rain. We sat down in a plaza overlooking the tower to listen to what we later found out was a French Christian Rock band and one song in with almost no warning it started to pour. We pulled out our ponchos, after yesterday we'll keep those in our backpack, and took cover under a tree. It stopped fairly quickly and we went back to the plaza. We took a bunch of pictures and sat on a bench for a while. At around 20h00 (8:00 PM) we went to dinner.

The restaurant was right on the river across the street from the tower. We were expecting to sit down and get served and everything, but when we pulled out our coupons, they said, oh that’s for the cafeteria. You each get a starter or dessert, one entre, and one piece of bread. So we grabbed our trey and pointed to the lasagna. It could have used a little reheating, but it was good. The food was fine, but it was a little disappointing that it was so much less then we were expecting. We paid twenty Euros each for it, but at that point there was nothing we could do. We finished our dinner and it started to pour again so we stayed inside the restaurant for a while. At 21h20 we walked over to the tower to take some more pictures and pass the time then walked back to the dock where our 22h00 cruise left.

The cruse was very nice. They took us down the river past all of the main attractions. We got some nice video which we will be happy to show you when we get home. The internet is not fast enough at any of our hotels to post videos. After the cruise we took the metro back to our hotel. Rachel went right to bed and is sleeping and I am going to do the same right now because tomorrow we are leaving at 7h50 for Reims, the capital of the champagne district.

Good night.

P.S. We love to read your comments and to know that you are reading our blog. Thanks for all of the kind words and for sharing in our excitement (or living vicariously through us)